Albert Muniz

Academic Degrees

• PhD, Business Administration, University of Illinois, 1998
• MS, Advertising, University of Illinois, 1992
• BS, Advertising, University of Illinois, 1991

Biography

Albert Muñiz is a heavily cited (more than 13,000 citations according to Google Scholar), award-winning researcher in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior. Before coming to DePaul, Muñiz taught at the University of California at Berkeley. His teaching interests include consumer culture and brand management. His research interests include sociological aspects of consumer behavior and branding, as well as consumer generated content and consumption communities. He has researched and published extensively in the area of consumer brand communities for more than two decades. He is the co-inventor of the concept brand community.

Muñiz has been published in Business Horizons, the European Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Advertising, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Interactive Marketing, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Retailing, the Journal of Strategic Marketing, MIT Sloan Management Review and Research-Technology Management. He served on the editorial review board for two of the top journals in marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research (13 years) and the Journal of Marketing (seven years), and co-founded and co-chaired the Chicago Consumer Culture Community seminar. His expertise on the socio-cultural aspects of consumer culture has been cited in: Business 2.0, the Chicago Tribune, CMO Magazine, Crain’s Chicago Business, Cult of Mac.com, The Financial Times, Forbes, LiveScience, Marketing News, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and Wired News.

In 2014, Muñiz was the co-recipient of the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Consumer Research Long-Term Contribution Award for his 2001 Journal of Consumer Research paper "Brand Community.” This award honors the long-term impact of a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research at least 10 years prior to the award. The article was also recognized by Thompson Scientific as one of the most frequently cited articles in the Business and Economics disciplines (more than 6,500 citations).

His most recent publications include “Marketing Artistic Careers: Pablo Picasso as Brand Manager,” with Toby Norris and Gary Alan Fine, in the European Journal of Marketing; “Coconstructing institutions one brick at a time: appropriation and deliberation on LEGO Ideas,” with Marie Taillard, in The Routledge Companion to Consumer Behavior; “The Cocreation of Brands,” with Hope Jensen Schau and Melissa Archpru Akaka, in the SAGE Handbook of Service-Dominant Logic; and “A Sociological Critique and Reformulation of Brands” with Thomas C. O’Guinn and Erika Paulson, in The Oxford Handbo​ok of Consumption.